Academic schedule development is a process in which every institution of higher education engages to some degree. While technology has been used to automate and improve many business processes in higher education, the process of developing academic schedules has not changed much during the past several years. The primary reasons for this inertia are the complexity and political volatility of schedule creation as well as an aversion to running an institution of higher education like a business.
The room assignment component of academic schedule building has long been acknowledged by mathematicians to be a hard (or NP-complete) problem. NP-complete optimization problems are sufficiently complex that it is not possible to prove one optimal solution. Michael W. Carter and Craig G. Tovey released a study in 1991 entitled When is the Classroom Assignment Problem Hard? In which they prove that all but the most simplistic approach to room assignment is NP-complete. Adding to the complexity is the fact that room assignment is only one of the NP-complete problems that make up the entire schedule building process. Meeting time and faculty assignment are also complex, NP-complete optimization problems. The fact that each of these complex components is related to, and constrains, the others makes the academic schedule creation process quite daunting.
Academic departments typically exert significant pressure on the academic schedule development process. “Turf” battles over control of space and prime teaching times are common. Pressure to allow senior faculty to dictate what they teach, when they teach and where they teach is usually high. These political limitations have made it difficult to implement student and efficiency oriented changes to scheduling practices.
Despite their considerable operating budgets, institutions of higher education do not like to be thought of as businesses. An assumed conflict between business and learning motivations appears to be the reason for this phenomenon. Budgetary pressures and competition from for-profit technical schools have only recently forced many institutions to think and act more like businesses.
Academic schedule development includes the following key steps: course offering management, faculty assignment, meeting time assignment, and room assignment.
Course offering management is the first step in academic schedule development. During this step, an institution seeks to determine a) what courses to teach, and b) how many sections of those courses (Course Sections) to offer. These determinations rely on the institution's understanding of student demand for the various courses in their curriculum, which heretofore has been very limited. Demand Analysis, when practiced in higher education, has been limited to studying populations of students who have taken courses in past academic terms. This approach, called Historical Analysis, has been applied to overall demand and subsets of the scheduling week—like Morning, Evening, Weekend—or academic term type—like Fall, Spring, Summer. Institutions with Lock Step curriculum track the size of each group that starts a fixed program of study each academic term. The size of this group, less attrition each term, is the basis for determinations of what to teach and how many Course Sections to offer. Neither approach features the student-specific needs analysis which is the key to significant scheduling process improvements.
Faculty Assignment is the process of matching available faculty members with Course Sections in a timetable. This is typically a highly decentralized process where the academic departments assign their available faculty to the Course Sections that are being offered. Like course offering management, there has been no significant process improvement in this area of academic schedule development.
Meeting time assignment is the process of placing Course Sections into time and day slots. These slots are typically standardized by an institution so that the majority of Course Sections use the standard meeting patterns (e.g., 8:00 AM-8:50 AM MWF might be a standard meeting pattern for three contact hour Course Sections that meet on Monday/Wednesday/Friday). Time assignments can be a decentralized (done by academic departments) or a centralized process (done by a central scheduling office). Time assignments attempt to cluster activities in popular (primetime) time slots while spreading assignments out enough to eliminate room and known student conflicts. Room conflicts occur when there are more activities needing a particular group of rooms during a time slot than there are rooms in that group. In manual and automated systems (commercial or homegrown), this type of room scarcity is only discovered after the scheduling process is materially complete and certain activities can not be placed. To eliminate student conflicts, an institution relies on its ability to predict the groups of Course Sections that students will need for an upcoming term so that they can attempt to keep those Course Sections conflict free (and the students can register for those Course Sections). There has been significant progress in commercial software that can automate this assignment process. There has, however, been no progress in the process by which institutions predict which Course Sections must be conflict free for an upcoming term. The best practice has been to study historical patterns at a macro (course) level to discern what courses students might take in the same term. This approach is ineffective in determining potential conflicts between Course Sections, which is the heart of the time assignment problem. This problem is related to the limitation in the process described as Demand Analysis in the course offering management section, above, and it applies to both the Roll Forward and Lock Step approach. Institutions using a Lock Step curriculum have a similar limitation. While it is easy to know which Course Sections a cohort is supposed to take, it is very difficult to track and account for students who deviate from their prescribed schedules. These institutions have an increasingly higher percentage of students who can fall off the prescribed schedules because of transfer credits, failed courses, and an unexpected change in their time of day availability forcing them to take a part-time load.
Room assignment is process of placing Course Sections into rooms. This can be a decentralized (done by academic departments) or a centralized process (done by a central scheduling office). The objective of this step in the schedule development process is typically to assign rooms that will be satisfactory to the faculty and have an appropriate capacity. Assignments must always be made so as to avoid double booking a Course Section with another Course Section or event.